Just remove Key “Install_Dir” completely from Windows Registry [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\xampp] and Xampp Control will start without error message. Xampp Control then shows “No installer package found” in status window after start.

The path as a data type string in the registry is without double-quotes [ c:\xampp ]. The programming code reading this path see the backslash [ \ ]as an escape character and actually read only c: and does not know what the next character x means and what to do with it; thus the path is invalid. In Ant’s example above the double-backslash [ \\ ] means, use the next character after the first backslash as a backslash and therefor the string [/c] now makes sense in computer programming language. The alternative is to put double-quotes around the path string, “c:\xampp” which I did and it works as well – this is the preferred method and I think it was an oversight in the development of this version of xampp.

I was installing xampp and got an error that apache could not be installed because port 80 and 443 were already in use,
mysql failed to install because it was in use
and also that filezilla failed because port 21 was already in use.
Please, kindly help me out